I have been reading this book and I enjoyed the depth and width within this book. Unlike the proceeding book: Fundamentals of Software Architecture, this book used an example to walk the reader through different solutions and techniques that you can use to explore and migrate a monolithic application to modern architecture such as microservices. I found the main rhythm aligns with the fundamentals book:

There is no perfect architecture. Architecture is a trade off.

which is why the initial analysis is such important task to do.

One thing I don’t like is that the example is too tailored for the content, which I hope i can see more examples I think monolithic application is generally hard to start decomposing at the beginning due to the spaghetti code. However, the example in the book is a code base that has some sort of structured code organization which i think won’t be the main case for a lot of monolithic applications. I am hoping the next version of the book could provide more guides on this part because that’s the most difficult part of decomposing monolithic application. Where do we start when we dealing with a real tangled monolithic code base is one of the purposes I read the book originally. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t give me a lot of tips on that part. However, the other techniques and patterns are still useful if you want to move to microservices such as data ownership, saga patterns etc.

Before reading this book, I didn’t know there are so many granular saga patterns based on 3 dimensions: consistency, atomicity and orchestration. The combinations of these 3 dimensions result in 9 types of sagas:

  • Epic saga
  • Photo tag saga
  • Fairy tale saga
  • Time travel saga
  • Fantasy fiction saga
  • Horror story pattern
  • Parallel Saga
  • Anthony Saga

Anthony Saga is the one people know of and from the book: Microservices Patterns: With Examples in Java. Of course, these sagas have different use cases and characteristics and some of them, as you can tell from the name (Horror Story pattern) are definitely no-go pattern. It’s just put there for informational purpose.

This is a good book to keep coming back and read a couple of more times.